32 THE QUARRY Fishes swam here through the Eocene too many fathoms up to think of without suffocation. Light-years of ooze, foreshortened into limestone, swarm with starfish remoter than the antiquated pinpoints of astronomy beneath the stagecoach laboring, when the thaws came, through mud up to the hubs. Midsummer's welling bluestem rose so high the wagons-prairie schooners under unmasted coifs of canvas- dragged belly-deep in grass across the sloughs. No roads, no landmarks to tell where you are, or who, or whether you will ever find a place to feel at home in: no alpine fastness, no tree-profiled pook's hIll, the habitat of magic: only waves of chlorophyll in motion, the darkened jetsam of bur oaks, a serpentine of willows along the hollows-a flux that waterlogs the mind, draining southeastward by osmosis to the Mississippi, where by night the body of de Soto, ballasted with sand-or was it armor?- sank into the ooze, nudged by the barbels, as it decomposed, of giant catfish. Others, in a terrain as barren as the dust of bones, kept the corrupt obsession going: gold-greed for the metal "That's just the sort of thing I was afraid of." The Larsons come and stand around for an hour, offering a lot of advice. "Does it have a name?" Sam wants to know. "Do you know where it was painted?" Martha says, "How about (Wreck of the Santa Maria at Plymouth Rock'r" She's already sent a color photo of the picture to a New York auction house for another estimate. W HEN the Larsons leave, Charles, who has a theory about Chuckie's habit, says, "Come on. My treat." They stop first at the bank. "Wow," Chuckie says, when Charles shows him the roll of coins. He's never seen a hundred quarters. An hour later, at the bowling alley, Charles is still taking hits in space, shouting "Whammo!" Instead of laughing, Chuckie's friends are yell- ing encouragement for a really dyna- mite dad. "What we're going to do is get pizzas and keep on playing," Ch uckie says. "If it looks like the place is going to close before we can most prized because by nature it's least corruptible. Flushed finally out of the heartland drainpipe, the soft parts of de Soto's body filtered into the capillaries of the delta. Will some shard of skull or jawbone, undecomposed, outlast his name, as the unquarried starfish outlast the seas that inundated them? Think back a little, to what would have been without this festering of lights at night, this grid of homesteads, this hardening lymph of haste foreshortened into highways: tbe lilt and ripple of the dark, birdsong at dusk augmented by frog choirs already old before the Eocene, the wickiups now here, now there, edged westward year by year, hemmed in or undermined, done in finally by treaties. The year the first land office in the territory opened, w hen there were still no roads other than wagon tracks, one Lyman Dillon, starting at Dubuque, drove a plow southwestward a hundred miles-the longest furrow ever, straight into the belly of the future, where the broken loam would soon be mounted, as on a howdah, by a marble capitol, the glister of whose dome still overtops the frittered sprawl of who we are, of where we came from, with its stilted El Dorado. . . get through the rest of the quarters, 1'11 start passing them around." If Charles can spend twenty-five dollars trying to make Chuckie O.D. on space video, Martha doesn't think he's got any complaint coming about the twenty she spent on the luminist catalogue. Besides, a friend of Mar- tha's parents is buying Charles' new piece-his biggest s le ever. Charles tells her he told the guy four thou- sand because that was the freshest fig- ure in his head. With this money as a cushion he's going back to his studio full time. A man from one of the Washington pa- pers is coming out to interview him, "ht J1.Å -AMY CLAMPrrT and he's bringing a photographer. With his cutting torch, Charles has made thirty-two legs-enough for eig ht more video machines. M ARrI'HA tells Arthur Saddler she thinks his comment about sup- ply-side economics in metal sculpture was uncalled for. She says she phoned only because she couldn't keep the new estimate on their painting to herself- ten to twenty thousand. There's an- other Silva being auctioned next month. They'll have a better idea after that. Instead of just redoing the roof, Martha says, she wants to add a gable on the back side to make room for a half-bathroom upstairs. It's normal for a man Charles' age to get up once a night, and why should he have to walk all the way downstairs? Charles has finished a second arcade machine This one uses enlarged, wide-angle color transparencies set up in series to achieve its stereoscopic ef- fect. Farm buildings, fields, and trees recede to a final mountain backdrop. A